A Chaplain’s Diary: Reverend Victor Laketek, O.S.B., 1942–1946

As an Army Air Forces chaplain during the Second World War, Father Victor Laketek, O.S.B., experienced homesickness, boredom, and all the seeming futility of isolated military bases far from the front. What he saw little of, at the locations where he served in Maine, Florida, California, and Canton Island, was anything like the spiritual renaissance some supposed was being brought about by the conflict. The diary he kept during these years offers a corrective to the “no atheists in foxholes” phenomenon sometimes reported by the popular press.